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I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat,

I can't possibly see this going well for salesforce. Buying slack for 70x revenue is insane. Their entire market is going to be eaten by teams and google chat, if it hasn't already. Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software because everyone is already using office. And those that aren't are on g-suite. Slack's recent guidance was horrible too.

paxys 6y ago
Google chat isn't a real competitor in the space. It has always been Slack and MS, and being #2 is a rapidly growing sector is still very valuable.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Not when your competitors are completely free
- crazygringo 6y ago
  It certainly is when it comes free with G Suite. A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack. In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.
stingraycharles 6y ago
Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Yea, google has a competitor called chat. As other comments have said it doesn't really stack up with teams/slack, but the video system is pretty good. It works well enough, an has seen consistent improvements over the year. Doubt any company would specifically choose google chat, but I know that many that already have deals for g-suite are using it. The thing is pretty much every company has a contract for office or google chat these days. Hard to imagine paying for slack when you've already got these free apps available.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    The video is good? Is that a joke?! I have weekly Beaver meetings with my daughter using google chat and _every time_ nearly all the feeds are frozen. Whereas my wife uses Zoom all day to talk to patients, with nary a hitch. Google chat video is the worst I've ever used.
    - colinmhayes 6y ago
      I've been on google meets all day since march and have never froze. Plenty of huge conference calls, screen sharing. Works great for me. Missing some features of zoom, but the video/audio quality is just as good in my experience.
      - egor2820 6y ago
        My experience having US<->Europe<->India comms and 10 guys everyday - video always starts to glitch and then goes to a complete freeze irrelevant whose country the video from. 1 times in 10 someone's audio gets lost completely.
- deleted 6y ago
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- deleted 6y ago
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- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  https://chat.google.com https://chat.google.com It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  They have an app that's absolute garbage compared to Slack - or even Discord, which is just embarrassing for a company like Google, frankly. I'm sure it'll die off soon, like everything that Google attempts that doesn't have a stellar launch and rapid growth rate.
HatchedLake721 6y ago
Google chat, lol. Which one? Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?
- lima 6y ago
  Google Chat, they have exactly one enterprise messenger (surprising, right?).
  - vehementi 6y ago
    No they don't?
    - howlgarnish 6y ago
      Enterprise, as in meant for companies and included in G Suite/Workspace. Duo etc don't count.
      - btmiller 6y ago
        Hard to read that with a straight face. What counts is what people use.
- singhkays 6y ago
  Damn! What kind of research did you have to do to write all those names or did you remember them all? :) They're so many now, I can only remember a few
  - hated 6y ago
    Your one stop shop for all things killed by Google https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
    - ant6n 6y ago
brundolf 6y ago
Slack's main differentiator up until now was that it wasn't tied up in a tech giant. That meant it had great compatibility with everything, and that it was, as a product, the primary focus of its company (and not just an accessory). I think it could have survived on that alone, but this acquisition throws that entire story in the garbage. Now it'll just be "Teams but worse".
- gwright 6y ago
  I haven't read the details but an earlier message said "70x revenue". It is hard to think of a reason not to sell at that multiple.
  - brundolf 6y ago
    Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future business.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.
      - deegles 6y ago
        That will be the year of the Linux desktop.
      - andreareina 6y ago
        What would that response be, other than refusing to use anything with mainstream adoption?
        jkaplowitz 6y ago
        Maybe insisting that this type of core service get provided by charitable nonprofits, which inherently can't sell to for-profits? ...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.
blackrock 6y ago
Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.
- Karunamon 6y ago
  Teams, indeed, sucks. The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with our productivity suite is enticing.
  - benhurmarcel 6y ago
    Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less likely to engage well in Teams.
    - blackrock 6y ago
oweiler 6y ago
Of all the messengers I've used Chat is by far the worst. Especially threading is almost unusable.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I don't think that matters really. Maybe companies that are already using slack won't switch, but if you're using chat, which is free, are the executives really going to decide that it's worth paying to switch to slack? I think it's unlikely. Hard to see where the market is other than startups that are already using slack. Slacks revenue is currently nowhere near enough for this valuation and I can't see it getting where it needs to.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  At least they have threads, but yes the way they do it is pretty terrible. I wish they took some inspiration to Zulip. Also it's really slow.
- dexterdog 6y ago
  How can it be worse than threading on slack?
silentsea90 6y ago
Google chat sucks so bad that googlers want to use slack instead
m3kw9 6y ago
Is not insane if you factor growth after the merger. Simple as that
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  The point is there's nowhere for slack to grow. Just about every organization gets comparable but slightly worse chat apps for free with their google or Microsoft subscription. Convincing executives to buy slack when they've got a free app from a trusted company that they're already paying for support will be very tough.
k4ch0w 6y ago
Have you used Gchat for bots/search/threading? It’s awful. It is not a good chat app and hasn’t changed much in 4 years. It plays catchup with competitors. Teams is so far away from having good features and app integration; Everyone I talk to that used Slack hates it. It’s just that it’s free with o365 that it’s even used. Honestly, I want to remind people everyone said the same thing about Google buying YouTube and FB buying insta. Two large purchases that were so worth it for the companies.
shoulderfake 6y ago
Ive never used anything but slack at work and that's with 4 different organizations. Microsoft teams was tried and ppl just kept using slack regardless.
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  I'm not saying orgs will switch away from slack. It's a great app. I'm saying orgs that are not currently using slack will not want to pay to switch when they've got a free IM app that works fine. For slack to be worth this valuation they need about 10x as much revenue. I don't see how they could possibly accomplish that when everyone has already picked an app at this point.
rsj_hn 6y ago
> Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate. This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.
- pjsnow 6y ago
  The overwhelming majority of consumers of enterprise software aren't devs, so you're correct to speak to your bias.
- bullfightonmars 6y ago
  My impression is that many if not most mid size and up orgs pay for the MS Suite at the company level. With 365 you can get the whole suite from email to docs, one drive, and teams. Teams comes free with the suite. My company moved from webex + adhoc solutions to teams and it has worked well, at least for video chat. MS office apps have decent support for Apple these days
wp381640 6y ago
It makes absolute sense - Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere. - Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year - Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily. - Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits) - Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack - Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams - They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently
- colinmhayes 6y ago
  Some decent points. 80% is good to see. The problem is I don't see anyway companies drop Microsoft. Everyone already has teams or chat for free, are they going to pay for slack now? Assuming slack moves to the same model, buy the salesforce suite and get slack, how much added value is slack really providing? Will companies be willing to pay more now that slack is included even though they already have chat apps? I'm not super knowledgeable on salesforce, but afaik only sales people have the subscription, so will companies have different chat apps for sales and everyone else? Seems like it would be easier to just put the sales people on teams with everyone else. Is slack a big enough perk that it would stop companies that are considering dropping salesforce? Is that worth 28 billion? That's really the only use I see. I agree this is a great move for slack, questioning how salesforce is able to leverage slack here when everyone else gives their chats away for free.
  - zxienin 6y ago
    Teams is the new Skype > everyone has Teams for free Prevalent sentiment at my workplace: Teams integrates well for outlook meetings, but it‘s a CPU hog, has crappy chat UI. It paralyzes work to the extent, that I only prefer to use Slack. Or zoom for bigger video calls.
eb0la 6y ago
The chat inside Salesforce was horrible. They get a good one with very little churn. Plus they have voice and video calling. You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle). If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(

paxys 6y ago

Google chat isn't a real competitor in the space. It has always been Slack and MS, and being #2 is a rapidly growing sector is still very valuable.

colinmhayes 6y ago
Not when your competitors are completely free
crazygringo 6y ago
It certainly is when it comes free with G Suite. A company that uses G Suite certainly isn't going to use MS, and usually won't choose to pay separately for Slack. In what sense therefore could it possibly not be a real competitor? It's there, it works, it's fine. It's also relatively young and so we can expect it to improve significantly over the coming years, similar to how Meet has been improving over the past few years.

stingraycharles 6y ago

Honest question: what is Google chat? I only know Hangouts, I did not know they had a Slack/Teams app as well? Or is this the very old app that was integrated into Gmail back in the day?

colinmhayes 6y ago
Yea, google has a competitor called chat. As other comments have said it doesn't really stack up with teams/slack, but the video system is pretty good. It works well enough, an has seen consistent improvements over the year. Doubt any company would specifically choose google chat, but I know that many that already have deals for g-suite are using it. The thing is pretty much every company has a contract for office or google chat these days. Hard to imagine paying for slack when you've already got these free apps available.
- dleslie 6y ago
  The video is good? Is that a joke?! I have weekly Beaver meetings with my daughter using google chat and _every time_ nearly all the feeds are frozen. Whereas my wife uses Zoom all day to talk to patients, with nary a hitch. Google chat video is the worst I've ever used.
  - colinmhayes 6y ago
    I've been on google meets all day since march and have never froze. Plenty of huge conference calls, screen sharing. Works great for me. Missing some features of zoom, but the video/audio quality is just as good in my experience.
    - egor2820 6y ago
      My experience having US<->Europe<->India comms and 10 guys everyday - video always starts to glitch and then goes to a complete freeze irrelevant whose country the video from. 1 times in 10 someone's audio gets lost completely.
deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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benhurmarcel 6y ago
https://chat.google.com https://chat.google.com It's a team chat, included into Google Workspace (G Suite). It's not terrible, and not great. It runs in the browser and integrates with Gmail; is really slow; has 1-to-1 messages, groups, and rooms; rooms have threads to organize conversations, but you can't see a list, you just end up scrolling a lot.
cbozeman 6y ago
They have an app that's absolute garbage compared to Slack - or even Discord, which is just embarrassing for a company like Google, frankly. I'm sure it'll die off soon, like everything that Google attempts that doesn't have a stellar launch and rapid growth rate.

HatchedLake721 6y ago

Google chat, lol. Which one? Google Wave? Google Buzz? Google Talk? Google Hangouts? Google Allo? Google Duo? Google Meet? Google chat that came with Google Apps? Or G Suite? Or Google Workspace?

lima 6y ago
Google Chat, they have exactly one enterprise messenger (surprising, right?).
- vehementi 6y ago
  No they don't?
  - howlgarnish 6y ago
    Enterprise, as in meant for companies and included in G Suite/Workspace. Duo etc don't count.
    - btmiller 6y ago
      Hard to read that with a straight face. What counts is what people use.
singhkays 6y ago
Damn! What kind of research did you have to do to write all those names or did you remember them all? :) They're so many now, I can only remember a few
- hated 6y ago
  Your one stop shop for all things killed by Google https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/
  - ant6n 6y ago

brundolf 6y ago

Slack's main differentiator up until now was that it wasn't tied up in a tech giant. That meant it had great compatibility with everything, and that it was, as a product, the primary focus of its company (and not just an accessory). I think it could have survived on that alone, but this acquisition throws that entire story in the garbage. Now it'll just be "Teams but worse".

gwright 6y ago
I haven't read the details but an earlier message said "70x revenue". It is hard to think of a reason not to sell at that multiple.
- brundolf 6y ago
  Sure, nobody said this doesn't work out well for the founders. Just the product, and its userbase, and future business.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    I wonder if and when the society will finally develop an immune response to this business pattern: a) get a large amount of people to tie their lives/businesses to a service you provide, b) sell out to a bigger fish, leaving these users high and dry.
    - deegles 6y ago
      That will be the year of the Linux desktop.
    - andreareina 6y ago
      What would that response be, other than refusing to use anything with mainstream adoption?
      - jkaplowitz 6y ago
        Maybe insisting that this type of core service get provided by charitable nonprofits, which inherently can't sell to for-profits? ...Yeah, I'm not expecting that to happen en masse either, honestly, as long as we live in capitalism.

blackrock 6y ago

Teams suck. Google Chat? What’s that? I’ll stick with Slack.

Karunamon 6y ago
Teams, indeed, sucks. The problem is that the people responsible for mandating its usage don't care how much it sucks, they care that it's working enterprise IM and they get it for free with the Office subs they're already paying for.
colinmhayes 6y ago
I don't disagree, but unless you're at a startup you probably don't get to choose. It's some executive choosing, and saying we saved a boatload by moving to the app that's included with our productivity suite is enticing.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Exactly. At companies that are large customers, employees don't get to choose. You get Google Chat integrated into your email inbox, and connections to Slack are blocked.
CharlesW 6y ago
Unpopular HN opinion: Teams doesn't suck. It's not as pretty/lovable as Slack, but it has an additional level of organization (each team gets their own set of channels), you can add tabs of related apps/sites to each channel, etc. As far as I could tell having used both simultaneously for a few years, Teams is a complete superset of Slack.
- jasonv 6y ago
  Switching channels/teams in Teams is far less efficient than moving through channels in Slack, which means I'm less likely to engage well in Teams.
  - blackrock 6y ago

oweiler 6y ago

Of all the messengers I've used Chat is by far the worst. Especially threading is almost unusable.

colinmhayes 6y ago
I don't think that matters really. Maybe companies that are already using slack won't switch, but if you're using chat, which is free, are the executives really going to decide that it's worth paying to switch to slack? I think it's unlikely. Hard to see where the market is other than startups that are already using slack. Slacks revenue is currently nowhere near enough for this valuation and I can't see it getting where it needs to.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
At least they have threads, but yes the way they do it is pretty terrible. I wish they took some inspiration to Zulip. Also it's really slow.
dexterdog 6y ago
How can it be worse than threading on slack?

silentsea90 6y ago

Google chat sucks so bad that googlers want to use slack instead

m3kw9 6y ago

Is not insane if you factor growth after the merger. Simple as that

colinmhayes 6y ago
The point is there's nowhere for slack to grow. Just about every organization gets comparable but slightly worse chat apps for free with their google or Microsoft subscription. Convincing executives to buy slack when they've got a free app from a trusted company that they're already paying for support will be very tough.

k4ch0w 6y ago

Have you used Gchat for bots/search/threading? It’s awful. It is not a good chat app and hasn’t changed much in 4 years. It plays catchup with competitors. Teams is so far away from having good features and app integration; Everyone I talk to that used Slack hates it. It’s just that it’s free with o365 that it’s even used. Honestly, I want to remind people everyone said the same thing about Google buying YouTube and FB buying insta. Two large purchases that were so worth it for the companies.

shoulderfake 6y ago

Ive never used anything but slack at work and that's with 4 different organizations. Microsoft teams was tried and ppl just kept using slack regardless.

colinmhayes 6y ago
I'm not saying orgs will switch away from slack. It's a great app. I'm saying orgs that are not currently using slack will not want to pay to switch when they've got a free IM app that works fine. For slack to be worth this valuation they need about 10x as much revenue. I don't see how they could possibly accomplish that when everyone has already picked an app at this point.

rsj_hn 6y ago

> Microsoft has such a gigantic advantage when it comes to enterprise productivity software Is that really true? I'm biased since I'm on the dev side, but everyone I know is using macbook pros, with very rare stragglers using windows or linux, and they use web clients for most stuff (e.g. gsuite, etc) rather than thick clients. I suspect with the push to working from home this will only accelerate. This is a shame, since I like Microsoft Office products and am one of the few people I know who thinks VB is a great productivity tool, .Net is superior (in terms of language design) to Java, and Excel, Visio are better than anything else out there. But it's been almost a decade since anyone I know has needed to use that stuff in the office.

pjsnow 6y ago
The overwhelming majority of consumers of enterprise software aren't devs, so you're correct to speak to your bias.
bullfightonmars 6y ago
My impression is that many if not most mid size and up orgs pay for the MS Suite at the company level. With 365 you can get the whole suite from email to docs, one drive, and teams. Teams comes free with the suite. My company moved from webex + adhoc solutions to teams and it has worked well, at least for video chat. MS office apps have decent support for Apple these days

wp381640 6y ago

It makes absolute sense - Slack wasn't going to survive as an independent. Their anti-trust efforts against Microsoft + Teams seemed to go nowhere. - Salesforce is one of the only companies that can go to-to-toe with Microsoft in the enterprise - 80%+ of the Fortune 500, 150k+ customers, 200k+ people at their conference each year - Salesforce already know your org chart so can roll out slack to anyone already on force.com easily. - Salesforce are building out from a data-up direction to take up what employees have open on their screens at work. Slack/collab was a big part they were missing (so is video/conf - zoom would be perfect but it's overvalued, Workday also fits) - Integrations with CRM, customer support, social media management, etc. are a no-brainer into slack - Microsoft are weak exactly where Salesforce are strong so a lot of customers are across both and would be tempted by free Slack over free Teams - They're issuing stock for half the acquisition and have a cap of 250B+ which is a bit bubbly but they're doing well P&L wise recently

colinmhayes 6y ago
Some decent points. 80% is good to see. The problem is I don't see anyway companies drop Microsoft. Everyone already has teams or chat for free, are they going to pay for slack now? Assuming slack moves to the same model, buy the salesforce suite and get slack, how much added value is slack really providing? Will companies be willing to pay more now that slack is included even though they already have chat apps? I'm not super knowledgeable on salesforce, but afaik only sales people have the subscription, so will companies have different chat apps for sales and everyone else? Seems like it would be easier to just put the sales people on teams with everyone else. Is slack a big enough perk that it would stop companies that are considering dropping salesforce? Is that worth 28 billion? That's really the only use I see. I agree this is a great move for slack, questioning how salesforce is able to leverage slack here when everyone else gives their chats away for free.
- zxienin 6y ago
  Teams is the new Skype > everyone has Teams for free Prevalent sentiment at my workplace: Teams integrates well for outlook meetings, but it‘s a CPU hog, has crappy chat UI. It paralyzes work to the extent, that I only prefer to use Slack. Or zoom for bigger video calls.

eb0la 6y ago

The chat inside Salesforce was horrible. They get a good one with very little churn. Plus they have voice and video calling. You can integrate this into the SF platform and your get a good defense against other players (MSFT, SAP, Oracle). If I can schedule a customer call and register it inside salesforce it would be great. Today I have to enter all manually on their interface :-(